Okay when Nintendo says 'it's in the bank' it's not literally in the bank. You don't have billions of dollars in capital without financial managers. So it's not like that money is in a Scrooge McDuck pile of money somewhere it's actively being managed. If it's making 1% annually in the last fews years it's being managed poorly I might add.

This is quite strange...

I distinctly recall an investor asking Kimishima how they will spend the 1 trillion yen cash on hand (back during the July meeting this year) Kimishima replied how they had to horde cash for investments, etc.

So, I went back too look at that earnings report and sure enough it says they only had 701 billion yen, and now I cannot find that investor's comments...

Is this a different timeline or something??? Such weirdness...

Nintendo saving money to fund exclusive GTA VI for Switch

First thing first. People here are confusing cash with cash and short term investments.

2.9 billion figure is just pure cash. Not including short term investments and other things. That 10 billion figure is not just pure cash it is cash and short term investments.

Actually might be wrong about 10 billion, since Nintendo didn't have that much in short term investment back in the day.

As in they might have had cash on hand of 10 billion with less investments.

However look at this for information of short term investments of recent years.

http://quotes.wsj.com/NTDOY/financials/annual/balance-sheet

This reminds me of the Jane Austen economy where people literally lived off of the interest of their fortunes.
All the gentry had their money tied up in government fonts with 5% interest, so if you had a fortune of around 10.000£ you'd have a neat 500£ per year to live on.

(A gentry livestyle could be sustained at around 100£ per person, per year, but you'd be considered pretty destitute and probably only have a small house with a single servant. If you had less, you needed to *gasp* work to make a living.)

Uh yeah, that being said, nintendo probably isn't a Jane Austen heroine and probably invests their money more celverly, not just to combat inflation but to make sure these cash reserves actually persist.

Tag to read the financial mumbo jumbo later.

Goodness, I hope not. Especially if VI will be anything like IV or V.

It's not like that. Companies transfer cash into stocks/bonds for example, having a monstrous pile of cash just sitting there often is not the best use of that cash. 

Just like with you, if you got $1 million dollars, it would be smarter to put that cash in an index fund (stocks) and earn a better return on that money than just leaving it in your savings account. Companies do the same thing. 

I would not be opposed to a spin off in the Mushroom Kingdom; would you?

Should've posted a 3DS picture... A lot of people forget that the 3DS was similar to the PS3 in regards of it being a sales success, but a financial disaster. Of course, it didn't cost Nintendo as much money as the PS3 cost Sony (which, at the very least lost them around 2-3 billion), but the 3DS really did not do well.